Monday, December 14, 2009

Reactions in the Cesspit ...

Obviously after reading the aforementioned blog, "Revisionist" primitive Greg Gerdes, on the Cesspit thread Muehlenkamp and Mermelstein, took issue with A Holland’s post of Sat Nov 21, 2009 4:48 pm. And he did it with the only "arguments" that sparrow-brained fanatics like him have at their disposal, like the "tens of millions of teeth" nonsense, the baseless "physically impossible" claim (more intelligent "Revisionists" than him, like Carlo Mattogno, have tried and miserably failed to demonstrate physical, technical or logistical impossibilities) and, last but not least, his pathetic "can you show me just one this and that" – howling (as to what amounts of human remains from Nazi mass murder have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to exist or have existed in the soils Babi Yar and the Nazi extermination camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, by "showing" such remains or otherwise, see among others my VNN posts nos. 172, 194, 777, 1710 and 1825 and my RODOH posts nos. 10971, 11200 and 11216, as well as the HC blogs mentioning Babiy Yar, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Poor Greg, I can only feel sorry for the way he keeps banging his hollow head against the wall of facts inconvenient to his articles of faith.

You 'prove' it by citing someone's memoirs. Memoirs of someone who allegedly has no reason to lie and wants to report something that really happened so that humanity can correct the mistake and learn from it and allow it to happen...NEVER AGAIN. Incase no one noticed, this seems to be Roberto's latest answer to Greg Gerdes' challenge of providing 'just one name' of a person who died in a gas chamber.

Drew J obviously didn’t pay much attention in reading my blog "Can you give the name of just one Jew, with proof, who was gassed?" and the excerpts from and introduction and biographical note to Oscar Strawczynski’s memoir in my RODOH post # 11612. Otherwise he might have realized that Oscar Strawczynski wrote his memoir in memory of his family members murdered at Treblinka (and not "so that humanity can correct the mistake and learn from it and allow it to happen...NEVER AGAIN") and didn’t exactly go out of his way to have it published. What is more, he refused to change or edit his manuscript after the war when urged to do so, because of the frankness with which the Jewish collaboration in Treblinka was depicted, by a Jewish community organization interested in publishing the memoir. The background and intention of genuine survivor memoirs like Strawczynski's is obviously a far cry from what ignorant intellectual dwarfs like Drew J would like it to be.

As to Drew J's inevitable "allegedly", what arguments supporting this feeble claim of manipulation does Drew J have against the essential accuracy of a memoir that

a) Is matched by other eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence to the mass murder at Treblinka, including but not limited to the evidence listed in my VNN posts nos. 172, 194,777 and 1825 and in previous posts on this blogspot, and

b) Was written by someone who never behaved in a manner that would call in question his credibility, who on the contrary – as pointed out in my related blog - was found to be highly reliable when testifying at a trial before the courts of a constitutional state like the German Federal Republic, held according to the defendant-friendly procedural rules of that constitutional state?

Let's see.

Drew J

Citing another memoir from an eyewitness who allegedly saw a bunch of people who went into a large room, screamed (because of gas) and never came out again. It seems like for every 'genuine' memoir we have on record that Muehlenkamp would throw his support behind, we can always dig up another false or exaggerated memoir. The latest from Eric Hunt is just one example out of many. The fact that many have lied already and been exposed, and are probably doing a religious duty by lying to circumvent Gentiles (Kol Nidre), justifies agnosticism about these so called eyewitness memoirs. If you doubt this look at what he says about me in another blog entry.

I doubt that bigmouths like Drew J can provide demonstrably false or substantially embellished memoirs in numbers to even match the authentic and essentially accurate depositions transcribed in my RODOH thread Treblinka Eyewitness Accounts. But even if they could, or even if false or substantially embellished depositions outnumbered authentic and essentially accurate ones, what would this mean? Would this justify skepticism as concerns the factuality of mass murder at Nazi extermination camps, as described by a great many essentially reliable eyewitnesses, largely from the ranks of the German camp administration, whose descriptions are corroborated by documents and other sources of evidence? No more so than the existence of thousands if not millions of phony Vietnam veterans justifies skepticism in regard to the historical record of the US War in Vietnam.

One thing that true believers like Drew J don’t realize is that, for their articles of faith to hold true, they cannot content themselves with bitching about this or that fake eyewitness, any more than hypothetical deniers of the war in Vietnam can make a point by exposing one or the other phony Vietnam vet. What they have to do is demonstrate that all eyewitnesses to Nazi mass murder, whether survivors or bystanders or perpetrators and even if considered reliable by the courts of constitutional states like the German Federal Republic, made up their stories from A to Z. And the fact is that "Revisionists" have not only failed to tackle most eyewitnesses, but are even unaware of the overwhelming majority. Consider, for example, the eyewitnesses on whose descriptions the Düsseldorf District Court based its reconstruction of events at Treblinka in the 1965 judgment against Kurt Franz and others, as quoted in my blog More Fun With Ugly Voice Productions (Part 1):

Drew J may want to tell us how many Treblinka eyewitnesses are mentioned in the above translated excerpt – besides Oscar Strawczynski – that "Revisionists" have never heard of let alone attempted to refute.

Yawn. As if any HC blogger had ever written anything suggesting that he accepted the overblown Soviet estimate of the Majdanek death toll. Drew J is setting up a straw-man so obvious that one can only fell sorry for his stupidity.

And what follows is no better: after some brainless bitching about another of Sergey’s articles (also written by "Muehlenkamp", of course), he goes into a rabid tirade against all those "liars" and tops it off with a lengthy quote about his favorite guru Joseph G. Burg's testimony at the Zündel trial – because, you see, all eyewitnesses to mass killing in Nazi extermination camps are inveterate liars but a "Revisionist" fanatic's gibberish is the gospel truth, in the cloud-cuckoo-land of other "Revisionist" fanatics.

Missing another chance to cut his losses by shutting up, Drew J lashes out in defense of his idol.

Guess Roberto just can't let it go. Burg had no reason to lie except that muehlenkamp says so.

These [German] war crime trials will not be a blessing for the German people. The hanging of those tried and sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal should have made an end to this sad chapter. The victors were shortsighted and very poorly advised when they subjected the Bundesrepublik to this cruel spectacle, because the continuation of these so called war crime trials was dictated to the Bundesrepublik in the General Treaty with Germany. Germans were to sit in judgement against Germans in this vile form. This is no search for justice but a proven anti-German policy.

The opposing debating team's comment to this slobbering nonsense was the following:

With all due respect for Mr. Ginsburg and his right to utter his personal opinion - if correctly rendered by our opponents - this author seems to have been woefully misinformed about two things:

1. That it was "the victors" who "subjected the Bundesrepublik to this cruel spectacle, because the continuation of these so called war crime trials was dictated to the Bundesrepublik in the 'General Treaty' with Germany";

2. That the trials conducted by West German criminal judgment made "Germans ... sit in judgment against Germans" in a "vile form", pursuing "a proven anti-German policy" rather than searching for justice.

Regarding item 1, it should be pointed out that according to the provisions of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch), which first came into force on 15 May 1871, German criminal law applies to crimes committed against or by German citizens. In other words, what Ginsburg believes the "victors" to have "subjected" the Bundesrepublik to results from German legal provisions that were in force long before there were any "victors" to subject Germans to anything, and started being gradually applied by West German criminal justice authorities as West Germany regained her sovereignty. The development of the prosecution of Nazi crimes by West German criminal justice is explained on the Justiz und NS Verbrechen website of the University of Amsterdam, under the link http://www1.jur.uva.nl/junsv/JuNSVEng/JuNSV%20English%20homepage.htm in an article which we highly recommend to read.

It becomes clear from this article that

i) during the years 1945 to 1952, the victors, far from forcing German to try Germans as Ginsburg would have it, limited the jurisdiction of German courts, which together with a lack of interest by German criminal justice authorities in crimes committed against foreigners led to prosecution being mostly focused on crimes committed by and against Germans on German soil;

ii) during the ensuing six years, 1953 to 1959, West German criminal justice, while restored to full sovereignty, lost interest in prosecuting Nazi crimes and limited its activities to a few "chance hits" or "leftovers" from the previous period, which furthermore resulted mostly in acquittals or stayed cases;

iii) The "reorientation" of the judiciary regarding the prosecution of Nazi crimes during the ensuing period resulted not from any foreign imposition, but from a "change in generations and spiritual climate" inside Germany;

iv) Prosecution of Nazi crimes was hampered by the West German legislative, which issued or changed legislation in such a way as to make most Nazi crimes fall under the statute of limitations when they could have been prosecuted;

v) The number of defendants whose trial ended without punishment was always considerable - roughly 50 per cent - and considerably higher than the number of defendants who were given a life sentence, even though the German criminal code mandates this sentence in case of murder.

The last of these characteristics leads us to item 2 of Ginsburg's assumptions. Aside from the West German law of criminal procedure (Strafprozessordnung) corresponding to the defendant-friendly principles of a constitutional state, the way in which both the procedural law and the material criminal law have been applied regarding Nazi crimes has been considered benevolent beyond the demands of law even by historians who expressly praise the achievements of German criminal justice, like Martin Broszat.

Quote:[...]Often reprimanded for its careful judgments, pleading for the accused or for facts not being provable in case of doubt, the judiciary of the German Federal Republic, with its voluminous investigation apparatus working over many years, has especially in the area of the extermination camps often contributed more to the clarification of this National Socialist crime complex than would have been possible to historians.[...]

Other historians and legal scholars are less gentle in their assessment of West German justice:

Quote:[...]If criminal trials nevertheless took place, the courts could not close their eyes before the enormous crimes that were exhibited before them, but they didn't want to make anyone responsible for these crimes. The judges' shyness to even call anyone a "murderer" flourished in a noteworthy manner. The Hannover County Court, for instance, sentenced an NS-perpetrator, who had committed a number of murders with his own hands, as "accomplice to murder", i.e. as a mere assistant of the murderer proper. And his superior, who had given him the corresponding orders, the court convicted merely as an "inciter". As there was no further actor between the two, the murders were factually "deeds without a perpetrator". [...] Against the actually convicted NS-criminals the courts often issued sentences which, according to the former Hessian General Public Prosecutor Fritz Bauer, came "rather close to mocking the victims". In the early 1960s, the German coordination council of the Christian-Jewish Society observed "since some time and with increasing concern, that the sworn courts [Schwurgerichte] of the German Federal Republic are treating mass murders and violent crimes from the National Socialist era (concentration camps, ghettoes, Einsatzgruppen etc. ... differently from other murders", that the Nazi criminals were given "minimum sentences for >complicity in murder< which, in the eyes of the general public, reduced the participation in mass murder to a crime in the order of magnitude of, say, heavy theft or professional receiving of stolen goods". One or two days imprisonment for every proven murder were not a rarity at these trials, and this was by no means only due to the astronomically high numbers of victims.[...]

A cruel spectacle, Mr. Ginsburg? Certainly so - for the survivors of the mass murders testifying in court.

The pursuit of a "proven anti-German policy", Mr. Ginsburg? Nonsense.

The emotional Mr. Ginsburg obviously didn't know what he was talking about. And it speaks volumes for the quality of the NT's "research" that, instead of looking for scholarly assessments of the handling of Nazi crimes by West German criminal justice, they preferred to make an uninformed writer - accurate rendering of Mr. Ginsburg's utterances provided - into the "key witness" of their case against a criminal justice which, if anything, can only be accused of having applied the defendant-friendly procedural rules of a constitutional state in an exceedingly cautious and benevolent manner in favor of the defendants when it came to Nazi crimes.

As we can see, Burg was one to make claims so divorced from reality as to warrant the conclusion that he was either lying through his teeth or lived in a fantasy world where his wishful thinking and preconceived notions became reality. He was certainly not a witness to be taken at face value on anything without independent corroboration.

Drew J

Well maybe that's not fair. Perhaps we know Burg is a liar because other memoirs contradict his.

The problem is not that "other memoirs" contradict Burg’s claims as concerns Auschwitz-Birkenau, but that these claims are at odds with

a) dozens of eyewitness testimonies independent of each other, often from former SS-men and/or subject to cross-examination at trials before the courts of the German Federal Republic, a constitutional state,b) documentary evidence corroborating those testimonies as concerns homicidal gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau, c) physical evidence corroborating the eyewitness and documentary evidence and d) documentary and demographic evidence showing that hundreds of thousands of Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and never left the place alive.

A witness with an obvious ideological motivation like Burg, whose claims are contradicted by a huge body of evidence and have no evidence corroborating them (other than perhaps the claims of other characters with the same ideological agenda) is dismissed as a liar or a loony in the real world. Not so in "Revisionist" cloud-cuckoo-land.

Drew J

Fine but mere contrarian views aren't enough. There needs to be evidence behind them. Unfortunately, it is lacking.

An interesting exercise in double-think, considering that the "contrarian views" here are those of Drew J and his guru Burg, which are not only without evidentiary support but at odds with all known eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence.

Drew J

Especially about the gas chambers in Auschwitz, which Leuchter showed problems with, was then countered, but then which Rudolf refuted and basically enabled Leuchter to update and correct his previous work.

Drew J seems to be a more than a little slow on the uptake, otherwise he would have realized that Rudolf's "refutations" were shown to be mendacious pseudo-scientific nonsense (albeit more sophisticated than Leuchter's rather primitive crap) in several articles and an expert report written by a professional colleague of Rudolf’s:

If Muehlenkamp and co. really cared about genuine holocaust victims, they would do their best to expose these phony memoirs like Eric Hunt is doing.

Unlike whoever this Hunt fellow is, I'm aware that every historical event or phenomenon has its phonies and wannabes and that such phonies and wannabes have little if any impact on the accurate historical record of such event or phenomenon. Hence such phonies and wannabes are not on top of my list of priorities.

Drew J

Hunt himself said he is in contact with Jews who are upset that these other Jewish liars are going to be exposed and make more people doubt the holocaust.

Mr. Hunt should tell such Jews – if existing – that only someone with manure instead of brains would "doubt the holocaust" because of one or the other phony "survivor", just like only someone with manure instead of brains would doubt that there was a US war in Vietnam because of all those phony "veterans" telling Rambo tales in bars throughout the US on a Saturday night. Drew J is kindly invited to forward my recommendation in this sense to Mr. Hunt.

Drew J

Now I say that when millions die all over Europe by murder or starving, and are taken into camps and lose their families to bullets or disease, that's a holocaust. You don't need gas chambers or six million dead for a holocaust. I have given links before to a Zundel video where he didn't deny a holocaust happened in world war two. He said it was a holocaust for all of Europe, not just Jews. But because he doesn't favour Jews, he gets into trouble.

The issue is not failing to "favor Jews", which is something I also do every time I point out that there were also millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder. The issue is denying that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis through various methods including but not limited to gassing, and that they were murdered in the context of a program to wipe out European Jewry.

Drew J

Roberto still can't deal with the fact that Berg talked to Ilya Ehrenburg the six million dollar man himself and revealed under oath in a Canadian court that Ilya himself confessed to Burg that he didn't see proof of Auschwitz gas chambers and therefore by implication, no six million number.

Is that supposed to be something to "deal with"? Even if Ehrenburg had actually told Burg what Burg claimed to have been told by Ehrenburg, the evidence to mass extermination by homicidal gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau is such that one would have to reasonably conclude that Ehrenburg must have been delirious or out of his mind when "confessing" to Burg that he "didn't see proof of Auschwitz gas chambers", assuming that Ehrenburg was one who had investigated what evidence to mass gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau was available to the Soviets. It is far likelier, however, that either Burg lied through his teeth or his fantasy-prone mind converted what he would have liked Ehrenburg to tell him into what Ehrenburg actually told him. Burg was certainly one to mistake his own wishful thinking and preconceived notions for reality, all the more so concerning a supposed event that – like Ehrenburg’s alleged "confession" – lay decades in the past.

Drew J

Roberto not only recycles his bottles, but also his repeatidly refuted argument about Burg.

This particular fanatic's blockheaded belief system (or his utter lack of honesty) shows most prominently as Drew J proclaims that "archaeologists" went to Treblinka and found "no evidence of soil or ground disturbance". We know what "archaeologists" he is talking about: a "Revisionist" wacko by the name of Richard Krege, who never published a report about his alleged world-moving finds because – as suggested by the analysis of his scans by GPR expert Lawrence B. Conyers and others – he must have realized that he had come upon the very soil disturbances compatible with mass graves that he had hoped not to find. And what's especially funny is that Drew J supports his claim with a link to the laughably hysterical website of his fellow cretin Greg Gerdes' fraudulent "association", from where references to Mr. Krege’s "archaeological" exploits have interestingly been removed …

Too bad he isn't as thorough as he makes himself out to be or he would realize that me and many others began to remain skeptical of where that bloody scan came from in the first place and if it really came from Krege or not. So he is making a straw man against me when he says I believe that scan came from Krege. We have no idea if it did or not anymore. Many on this board are agnostics over it. Therefore, we couldn't possibly be suffering from the cognitive dissonance Roberto accuses us of in the following way: "the scan shows soil disturbance but there still was no holocaust."

"Revisionists" are a funny lot. "Revisionists" such as CODOH moderator Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis have for years paraded the scan in question as proof that Krege had found no soil disturbances compatible with mass graves at Treblinka. Now that the scan has been held by an expert in GPR matters to probably show the exact opposite of what Krege and his fellow true believers claimed it to show, some of those true believers beat a hasty retreat into lamely claiming that the provenance of the scan is uncertain. This is nothing other than the good old Plan A/Plan B scheme that "Revisionist" charlatans tend to apply in regard to German documents. Plan A: try to make believe that the document does not incriminate the Nazis and actually supports the "Revisionist" position. When Plan A fails because the document is clear evidence to mass murder, apply Plan B and yell "forgery, forgery". Pathetic.

If, by the way, Drew J had an "agnostic" approach to the provenance of the scan, then whence did he derive his high-handed claim that "archaeologists" went to Treblinka and found "no evidence of soil or ground disturbance"? Did he blindly believe the assertions of a fellow "Revisionist" without asking what evidence supported these assertions? Between that and having based his position on a GPR scan that turned out to show the opposite of what "Revisionists" claimed it to show, I don’t know which makes Drew J look sillier.

But Drew J’s squirming gets even funnier as he tries to open himself an outlet with the following question, apparently aware that he has nothing to show for his claim that the scan did not originate with Krege:

Drew J

Even if it did show soil disturbance, how does that prove pounds upon pounds of ashes? How many square feet or meters does that scan in question cover anyway?

Drew J is shifting the goalposts now. As nobody claimed that the scan proves the number, size and contents of the Treblinka mass graves all by itself (to that effect it is just one out of many parts of the puzzle, one that further corroborates what becomes apparent from eyewitness, documentary and other physical evidence to mass murder at Treblinka), it's a moot exercise to babble about what the scan alone does not show. The point is that this scan was paraded by "Revisionists" as evidence that there are no soil disturbances compatible with mass graves at Treblinka, and that all evidence pointing to the mass murder at Treblinka and the presence of related mass graves at that place must therefore be called in question. What the scan actually does, however, is to corroborate rather than contradict the eyewitness, documentary and other physical evidence pointing to the mass murder at Treblinka and the presence of related mass graves at that place. As such the scan is a shot in the foot of "Revisionism", and the true believers' laughable attempts to now distance themselves from this evidence by disputing its provenance only make them look even more ridiculous than they do anyway.

Drew J

Too many unanswered questions about that scan and its origins has resulted in me and many others adopting agnosticism about it, not blind adherence as Roberto portrays it to be.

Says the fellow who in an earlier post claimed that "archaeologists" went to Treblinka and found "no evidence of soil or ground disturbance". Who does he think he is fooling? He seems to have problems even fooling himself.

The CODOH thread New challenge & reward offered by the NAFH continues with more gibberish by Drew J and Gerdes, also in reaction to some acid remarks by "Wahrheit", a more intelligent "Revisionist" who seems to be not unreasonably concerned with the (further) damage that primitives like Drew J and Gerdes are doing to the image of "Revisionism". These posts may later be commented in the RODOH forum's Memory Hole section.